Europe's Bill Clintons
<http://slate.msn.com/foreigners/entries/01-05-08_105759.asp>
By Anne Applebaum
Tuesday, May 8, 2001
"Za Chlebem do Polski" read the joke title of a front-page article in
Zycie, a Warsaw newspaper, over the weekend. The literal translation of the
phrase is "To Earn His Bread in Poland," but the connotation is somewhat
different. To go and "earn bread" abroad implies emigration to America,
third-class steamer berths, Ellis Island. Nobody from America, of course,
comes to "earn bread" in Poland. But the subhead then continued the joke:
"Now even Bill Clinton, the former president of the United States, finds
that it pays to do a bit of work in Poland." For it is he: While it isn't
exactly a reverse immigration, the former president is scheduled to make a
speech here the week after next, at a business conference. Nor is Zycie the
only paper to have trumpeted details of his rumoured fee ($100,000) and the
cost of tickets to the conference ($1,500), enormous amounts of money in a
country where the average wage is a few hundred dollars a month, and most
people, if you asked them, would probably prefer to pay retired politicians
not to speak.
Curiously, news of Bill Clinton's first unofficial trip to Warsaw has
filtered out in the same week that another Polish newspaper, Gazeta
Wyborcza, is sponsoring another conference, this one dedicated to the
"Generation of 1968." Among those attending are Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the
leader of the 1968 student revolt in Paris; Peter Uhl, Czech dissident and
founder of the illegal Revolutionary Youth Movement in Prague;
Sergei Kovalyov, Russian dissident of the same generation; Adam Michnik,
Polish dissident and editor of Gazetza Wyborcza. Alas, the most famous
American member of the club will not actually overlap with his European
counterparts, but their proximity makes me think that the phenomenon of the
generation of 1968, so much remarked upon over the past eight years in the
United States, deserves another Pan-European look.
For what is immediately striking, looking over the list of participants,
and counting a few who will not be in Warsaw over the next few weeks, is
how similar their career patterns have been, which is strange, given what
different societies they came from. The students of Berkeley were
protesting against Vietnam and capitalism. The students of Paris were
protesting against Algeria and capitalism. The young Joschka Fischer, now
German foreign minister, threw rocks at police in protest against the
wartime silence of his parents' generation and against capitalism. Young
Czechs and Poles, on the other hand, were organizing university riots
against communism in Warsaw. Meanwhile, the Russian dissidents were barely
able to unfurl a few banners in protest against the Soviet invasion of
Prague in 1968 before they were rounded up and shipped off to prison camps.
Nevertheless, they did all have a few things in common. They all wore the
uniform of their era: T-shirts, sneakers, blue jeans (the Russians had to
buy them on the black market). Many of the East European dissidents were
the children of Communists and were thus, like the Westerners, engaged in a
recognizable form of generational rebellion. Many in both East and West
were influenced by the ideas of the New Left and also spoke dreamily of a
Third Way between communism and capitalism, although in the case of the
Easterners, this was largely because actually calling for capitalism was
considered too outrageous.
Just as the baby boomers have left their distinctive stamp on American
politics, the same generation of European intellectuals also left their
mark on their own countries. In Eastern Europe, the dissidents who came of
age in 1968 became both the tacticians and the coordinators of the
revolutions of 1989. They wrote and distributed the samizdat pamphlets,
they helped organize the strikes and protests, they kept Western
journalists informed. In the wake of the revolution, many moved from the
world of shadow politics into public roles, and they had extremely high
hopes. They were idealists poised to put their ideals into practice.
Unfortunately, a decade after 1989, the dissidents of the 1968 generation
look less heroic, and more like their Western counterparts. A few, like
Fischer and Vaclav Havel, have succeeded in mainstream democratic politics.
Others, like Cohn-Bendit, exist on the political fringe. Some, like
Kovalyov, are effectively still dissidents. Some dropped out
altogether. Many others, like Michnik, became journalists, the profession
to which the irresponsibly critical have always been attracted, and no
wonder: As a rule, the generation that popularized the rhetoric of
destruction hasn't proved particularly good at working within political
institutions, even democratic political institutions. It is striking, in
fact, that the outstanding political successes of that generation are those
who created their own. Fischer became a leader of the German Green Party;
Havel invented the democratic Czech presidency. Both were condemned by
their former comrades, the Germans who thought Fischer had sold out to the
system, the Czechs who didn't understand why their old friend Vaclav didn't
want to get drunk with them anymore.
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